Monday, March 23, 2009

Wallinger's Horse

As you might expect, Mark Wallinger's horse is a metropolitan phenomenon - a bigger story in London newsrooms than it is at the site for the horse itself in north Kent. There, people continue to go about their business as though a white stallion as high as Nelson's column, plonked in a field beside the A2 and the high speed line to Europe, was something they would believe when they saw it. This week's Gravesend Reporter put the story on page 10.

According to Sandra Soder, the secretary of the Gravesend Historical Society, Wallinger's horse has aroused diverse local opinion, with the loudest voice coming from those most opposed, but the general feeling is that the promoters had deemed the people of north Kent 'too culturally inept' to have a deciding view on the form Britain's biggest work of art should take.

In the words of one Northfleet man, nobody had asked whether or not "they wanted to wake up every morning looking into a giant horse's arse".------------